‘Trust not a man; we are by nature false, Dissembling, subtle, cruel, and unconstant’.

So opens the 1680 play The Orphan, a domestic tragedy that reveals a history of gendered warfare, a sense of women as their own protectors by necessity, the final line of defence against male aggression. Gendered violence and conflict was, to an early modern audience, twisted around the core of every man, inevitable, obvious.

The title of this piece is stolen. Garthine Walker’s original essay Everyman or a Monster? looks at the paradigm shift between the way sexual violence was understood from the medieval period into the 19th century- the shift in understanding rape as the act of the everyman to that of the monster. Walker argues that in the mediaeval and early modern period, the two sexes were understood as often inherently opposed- in a state of constant conflict salved only by marriage, if that. Women were seen as under the thumb of male violence- violence of which every man was deemed capable. Sexual violence, was not seen as unusual or aberrant, but rather on the extreme end of a sliding scale dealing with male behaviour. It lurked within the parameters of the social scripts of the time- while women were “the victims of seduction, men became the stooges of their own lust.”

the everyman

Counter-intuitively, this discourse of inevitable violence, rape as an expression of extreme sexual behaviour, the “everyman-rapist”, gave way to women’s accounts being privileged in courts of law. Sexual violence was one of the only charges women could independently bring to court without the involvement of a husband, father or brother- though rape itself was characterised as a property crime, the ‘goods’ in question a woman’s virtue. Rape was spoken to directly in the court and punishment could range anywhere from castration to a fine. Early modern conviction rates stood at 35%, in contrast to modern rates of 1% in the UK- although many early modern rape cases were settled in civil court rather than criminal court. Conversely, justifications of rape in response to refused sexual advances- such as that of William Hill who raped a 15 year old girl in Cheshire in 1651, saying, “that he loved her well and that if she did not suffer him to have his pleasure of her, he would kill her”- were offered up openly in court.

Scenes from mediaeval & early modern courtrooms: 

1405 - A woman stands before the court. She is being tried for ambushing a man, castrating him, stealing his horse. She is pardoned, on the grounds of just cause, her actions viewed as vigilante justice exacted upon a rapist.

 1561 - A man, Robert Bullo, is sentenced to appear before the church congregation every Sunday to ask publicly for Marion Stenson’s forgiveness after raping her. 

 1269 - A woman is assaulted by a stranger whilst engaged to be married; her fiance stands beside her in court and helps her to win both the imprisonment of her rapist and a
large sum of money.

As it was understood that every man was capable of rape, that rape was an extreme expression of ‘desire’, that it was common, the thing that had to be proven was the act itself. In one final case in Glasgow, a servant, Isobel Burne, accused a wealthy man, John Anderson, of attempted rape. Anderson, the higher-status of the two, confessed in court and he was banished from the town “for the great offence to God and the slander to Isobel”.

the monster

Come the Enlightenment. The growth of the middle classes and proliferation of religious piety brought about stricter moral codes.  Power in this new model became more diffuse, more insidious, and focused on normalisation as opposed to restriction. Examination and categorisation becoming “the deployment of force and the establishment of truth”: the era of the asylum, the Panopticon, the psychoanalyst’s chair. Power no longer depended upon its exercise in the public realm- the courtroom, the throne- but could be moved into the private realm, exercised and upheld by all against all.

The changes in the 18th century had a two-pronged effect on the way in which sexual violence narratives were constructed and understood; firstly, a greater focus on categorising what was ‘normal’ and what was not led to an understanding of the rapist as monstrous, subhuman or aberrant. Rapists were no longer the every-man, but instead rare, demonic, Jack the Ripper types. Secondly, the sexual revolution of the 18th century emphasised male sexual liberty- the man as king over his body, his desire, his sex- creating virtues of sexual restraint that had not been understood as possible before. The middle-class man became the centre of sexual moral authority. Men’s sexualities ceased to exist in the messy brawl of the public realm, but were reconstructed as a private matter, their domain, their home. 

New discourses around the sexual control and purity of the middle classes began to erase the notion that the everyman could rape. Women no longer had to simply prove the act had taken place, but had to prove monstrousness, a term loaded with racial and class implications. Working-class men were increasingly presented as the central perpetrators of sexual violence, and working-class women as the hapless victims of it-  a problem between certain types of men and certain types of women. The middle class man could not rape; he had not been born a rapist and by virtue of this never could be. Increasingly women were made responsible for sexual violence that was enacted upon them.

Rape became relational- something protected by the sanctity of the home, where most rape still to this day takes place. It was the product and the problem of the home adjudicated domestically in all but the most extreme cases, such as the Jack the Ripper murders- which were played upon to demonstrate the newly demonic rapist, the monstrous assailant, the coverage playing on class and racial tensions, zoomorphism. Identity of both perpetrator and victim began to play a central part in sexual violence allegations; the categorisation of ‘rapist’- a term not even used until 1883- and what that looked like became more important than the act itself. 

This has led to sexual violence communicating something new, with it producing new forms and sources of power for particular men; for certain men, all they have had to prove is their ‘good character’. Whilst the threat of sexual violence continues to shape the spatial lives of all women, the Enlightenment marks the point at which sexual violence ceased to be about all men. 

what is beautiful is good

Trace this to the modern day-We have not moved away from the idea of rapists as monsters- in part because it feels intuitive. The act of rape is such a monstrous act with shattering implications on the way someone continues to live their life, why would this monstrousness not leak into the perpetrator?

 Three scenes from a modern courtroom:

 Scene 1 - The defendant is described repeatedly as a family man, he could not have sexually abused his daughter because he was well-liked in the community, the impossibility of this accusation of rape twinned to his status as an overall ‘good guy’. This man is acquitted. 

Scene 2 - The defendant is found guilty of rape- but he is a champion swimmer, popular, clean-cut. The judge decides that the defendant was probably too drunk to know what he was doing, in the defendant’s words, “in no way was I trying to rape anyone, in no way was I trying to harm anyone, and in no way was I trying to take advantage of anyone.” His friends write in to say they do not think he fits the rapist paradigm, that “if I had to choose one kid I graduated with to be in the position Brock is, it would never have been him. I could name off five others that I wouldn’t be surprised about.”. He serves only three months.

Scene 3 - Kobe Bryant is accused of rape. Consistently his brilliance is emphasised in the media. He is charged. The woman states she cannot go ahead and testify due to harassment from his legal team. After his death, one newspaper writes how we judge his life depends on “how deeply you believe that he corrected his grievous fault through the life he lived afterwards, and how deeply you believe that he corrected that fault, immediately and beautifully, and in midair.”

What is beautiful is good, they say. 

Monsterisation fundamentally absolves men of rape, because many men who rape will not present as monstrous to those around them. It shackles accountability to image, placing the burden of proof on women to demonstrate sickness within the man they accuse.

The notion of the monster is one that hinges upon otherness, a sense of the subhuman, the unthinkable. There is a carceral mentality behind a lot of this thinking; the notion that to lock away, to relegate to other physical or psychological realms is to be safe from the broken or evil elements of society.  We need to be able to lock things away, both literally (not that this translates to any kind of conviction rate; the existence of prison ultimately allows us to believe we are protected from things we are not) but also psychologically. Otherness is comforting- it allows us to imagine that we are not capable of terrible things. When we siphon the act of rape off as something only monsters are capable of, we abdicate society’s responsibility for it; we pretend it comes not from inveterate misogyny, from the ways in which our society encourages and legitimises rape, but from a deep, incurable, personal sickness. We take a human act and place it into a realm beyond comprehension and in doing so, we wash our hands of it. We say ‘this is beyond understanding, beyond the ordinary, beyond human behaviour’, we do not deal with it or attempt to prevent it. We pretend that it is something that can be eliminated only through hunting these monsters and imprisoning them.

And yet this is fundamentally a distortion- we know that normal men can and do rape. 

Aviva Orenstein addresses how the notion of rape as the product of a small, sick subset of the male population affects the way people view rape: “Another form of denial is to see rape as exceptional or unusual. Despite the statistics, people tend to see rape as drastically divergent from typical interactions between men and women. Because it is viewed as wildly aberrational, the threat of rape seems more distant, and hence less threatening.”

To call a rapist aberrant ignores something both painful and elemental: rape is not an anomaly but a common occurrence. When it is suggested otherwise- that in order to rape you must be in some way pathologically aberrant- we divorce the act from the human realm, we mythologise their circumstantial power.

An Outsider, an outlier, an anomaly. Yet we know that the rapist more often than not comes from within- within the home, the church, the family, the school. Five out of six rapes are committed by someone known to the victim- perhaps even someone loved by them. Women who have been assaulted often doubt their own perception of events, or whether it ever really occurred. The brain, unable to reconcile the real image of their rapist- partner, friend, family member, colleague, coward- with the scripted one, forces women to contend with doubt as to the veracity of their own experience. In our need to view the rapist as an outsider, we are blind to this. 

“Stay away from him, he is a very dangerous man, he’s a monster” said a psychiatric nurse to a friend of mine.

“i am not that guy”

When rape is considered to prove a man a monster, irreparably subhuman, men are loath to accept any accountability for their actions. To admit “I raped someone” goes against every instinct when it is synonymous with “I am a monster”. I know many women who, upon confronting their rapists have been met with familiar refrains:

 “I am not that guy”

 “I know the type of guy I am”

 “I would never do something like that”

But they have. This cognitive dissonance, the inability to frame their actions as rape because of what they think a rapist should look like robs those they have assaulted of a sense of accountability- an admission of guilt, an apology.

When we monsterise rapists we unspool the notion that all men must be aware of their capacity to hurt others- they must be able to recognise this within themselves in the same way we all recognise our capacity for harm. Sexual relationships have to be conscious, and part of the consciousness for men lies in questioning their own actions, their feelings towards women, their unaired misogyny. When we separate the act from the notion of the monster, we force men to consider their actions as they are acting upon them, rather than allowing them to commit sexual violence freely, convinced that what they are doing could not possibly be rape because they are not a rapist, they are not a monster, they could never be capable of that.

There is no one type of man who rapes. Men whose close friends and family members have suffered devastating sexual violence and who have seen the effects up close- they can and do rape. Men who have all the language and understanding of consent and its boundaries- they can and do rape. Men who have themselves been victimised- they can and do rape. This is not to say that many rapists are not unquestionably predatory, violent people. Nor does it ask us to ‘understand’ what leads to these actions. This is not “rights for rapists”, it is not about how they sleep at night.  But it does require us to see rapists as people, and rape as a human act.

“I am not that guy” no longer applies when rape designates an act rather than a person. While feminist thinkers often emphasise the damage of the ‘perfect victim’ mentality, we have not fully reckoned with the notion of the ‘perfect rapist’. We have to dethrone him from his seat in hell and drag him back to earth to face accountability. 

When we reject the label of monster for men who rape, we do not reject the monstrosity of the act. This is also not about individual experience- many women are totally valid in experiencing their rapists as a monster. But this rather is about interrogating the social scripts from which we work- the words in the courtroom, the newspaper, the doctor’s office- the same kind that require women to prove a man’s monstrousness in order to prove his actions. 

again, the everyman

To resurrect the idea of the everyman is to be in many ways hopeful; it allows for a future where changes in education and an emphasis on men’s responsibility to be accountable for their sexual behaviour could change the prevalence of rape. It provides for a better reckoning with the sheer numbers of women who have been assaulted. It explains that we are not overrun with monsters but with cowards, helps us understand how rape can be so common in a world that is not burning.

“Teach boys not to rape rather than teaching girls to walk home with their keys between their fingers” was an idea already going around when I was at school. Yet we never discuss what teaching boys not to rape actually looks like. The first step is making them aware of their capacity for sexual violence. That they do not have to be monsters in order to do so. That their sense of their own normalcy is not a barrier to their ability to commit terrible acts of violence. 

The courtroom is too little too late,  the rare final act of a story that begins not in the club or the pub or the party but in the schoolroom. The courtroom only tells the smallest piece of this tale, acts as the stage for a vanishing number of cases, yet is central to the story we tell ourselves about what rape looks like and who rapists are, central to the self-justifications of men who rape without ever dreaming they will end up there. And they so rarely do. 

The central drama of The Orphan revolves around a man who tricks his way into the bed of his brother’s unknowing wife. It is a play about deception, the primal danger of man, the anguish of being betrayed by someone you love. Yet, as the husband rages against the gods and the forces of hell whilst confronting his brother with what he has done (“Ye Gods!... what hell-bred villain durst profane the sacred business of my love?”), his brother reminds him:

“Blame not the heav’ns, ‘tis I has wrong’d thee”

And he runs onto his brother’s sword.    

They hear her laughing in the garden- what did you just say? He sits small, diminutive, picking thorns out of skin. He knows what he has done, he jokes on it, cuts his eyes- but really no he can’t have done, thought you’d wake up, knows the kind of guy he is: never venal, venereal, villain. Back at the bar he orders a whiskey, and then another, and another, sinking slowly into familiar spaces. Tomorrow he will try to erase it, regain composure. She may have days, nights, disease. But there he amounts to little. De ribbed. Not quite dangerous, but strange, small— boy. You know what you’ve done, are how you are. 

He’s wearing new trainers- huh,
what you running from?